It’s not an exaggeration. When Gobekli Tepe was uncovered in 1994, it changed everything we thought we knew about human history.

Gobekli Tepe is a massive, ancient temple found in Turkey, built out of pillars organized into great stone rings. The pillars are decorated with intricate sculptures of lions, scorpions, and vultures, twisting around their sides, but they’re more than just beautiful works of art. They’re the foundations to a structure, holding upheaving blocks that, some of which weight more than 10 tons.

The artwork and engineering is incredible. That anyone could have lifted up 10-ton stones and placed them atop a foundation strong enough to hold them in place is an incredible feat in any time.

But what makes Gobekli Tepe so unbelievable is that it was built in 10th millennia BC – more than 11,500 years ago – and is actually the oldest temple in the world.

Just How Long Ago Was 9,500 BC?

An intricately sculpted totem pole from Gobekli Tepe. March 11, 2017.

Let’s put that in perspective. Stonehenge was built in 3000 BC, and the oldest signs of human writing were created in Sumer in 3,300 BC. That means that Gobekli Tepe isn’t just older than written language. More time passed from the construction of Gobekli Tepe to the invention of the written word than from Sumer to today.

Even agriculture didn’t exist yet – or, at least, certainly not in that area. There are, admittedly, some small signs of people growing crops before 9,500 BC, but it’s doubtful that there were any full-fledged communities with farms.

The people who built Gobekli Tepe were what we’d call cavemen. They were hunters and gatherers working with tools made out of stone. And they managed to build something that should have been impossible.

Klaus Schmidt’s Discovery Of Gobekli Tepe

The Gobekli Tepe Archaeological site. March 9, 2012.

The archaeologists who first found Gobekli Tepe in the 1960s didn’t think it was anything more than a medieval graveyard. They had found a hill with broken slabs of limestone and didn’t bother looking further, sure there’d be nothing more than a few bones laid to rest a couple of centuries before.

It wasn’t until 1994 that the truth came out. Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, visited the site and realized immediately that there was something massive hidden underneath that hill. “Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,” Schmidt would later say: “go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.”

He decided to stay, and he’s been working on the site ever since. It was worth it. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that this temple really was built 11,500 years ago, making it easily one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in recent history.

A Stone Age Temple

A close-up view of one of Gobekli Tepe’s pillars. September 6, 2011.

It’s hard to say anything for sure about how a place as old as Gobekli Tepe was used. Schmidt is convinced, though, that it was built as a temple.

There are no cooking hearths, houses, trash pits, or farms to suggest that anyone ever settled down and started a town around it. Instead, it seems that the people who used it were constantly on the move. They were nomadic hunters who couldn’t stay in one place for long.

“It’s a landmark,” says Jens Notroff, an archaeologist who works on the site. “Back then people would have to meet regularly to keep the gene pool fresh and exchange information… It’s no accident they gathered there.”

They would have massive feasts inside. That’s something we know for sure because they left countless animal bones behind. The animals they ate, though, were all wild animals like gazelle, deer, birds, and aurochs. They were animals that were hunted and carried off to the site for a meeting that must have held a deep, spiritual significance.

There’s a good chance they got drunk during these meetings, too. Massive, stone jars were left behind at the temple site, big enough to hold more than 40 gallons of liquid. There’s no way to know for sure but the archaeologists suspect that liquid was an early type of beer.

A close-up of one of the pillars, depicting what’s believed to be an image of an ancient god. June 12, 2011.

People came from incredible distances to visit Gobekli Tepe.

According to Schmidt, people from Israel and even as far as modern Egypt would have made the pilgrimage up to Gobekli Tepe – a trip that, if he’s right, would’ve required them to travel up to 1,500 kilometres.

For anyone to travel that far, it would’ve had to have been the mandate of the gods. That’s part of the reason why the archaeological team is convinced that this was an ancient temple and that the carvings on the pillars are a glimpse into an ancient, Stone Age idea of the gods.

“I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods,” Schmidt says. “They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers. In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all. What is this universe? Why are we here?”

Gobekli Tepe: A Challenge To Human History

Sculptures from Gobekli Tepe on display in a museum in Urfa, Turkey. May 13, 2012.

This is more than just an old temple. It’s a discovery that forces us to seriously rethink some of the biggest ideas about how human civilization began.

Before, it was always assumed that civilization began with agriculture. People settled into farming communities first, we believed, and then worked together to build the massive temples and buildings that would make up humanity’s first cities.

Gobekli Tepe, though, was built 500 years before its people built their first farms. That might mean that our whole concept of how human civilization began needs to be rethought. Here, at least, people seem to have congregated and worked together to build a temple before even making their first farms.

Perhaps culture came before agriculture. That’s what some people think Gobekli Tempe represents. The force that gave birth to civilization wasn’t necessity or survival – it was something spiritual.

About 110 million years ago, a giant plant-eating Nodosaur gobbled down its last meal on Earth — and its stomach was preserved so well over time that scientists have now been able to determine what, exactly, its last meal was.

The remarkable specimen was first discovered in 2011 during a mining operation in Alberta, Canada.

The Nodosaur was found with its skin and guts intact and was altogether so well-preserved that it was referred to as a dinosaur “mummy.” A researcher involved in the study described the prehistoric specimen as having the best-preserved dinosaur stomach ever found to date.

A National Geographic video about the nodosaur, the best-preserved fossil of its kind ever discovered.

It took six years for Mark Mitchell, a technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, to carefully dig out the dinosaur’s preserved skin and bones from the marine rock in which it had been encased. His efforts revealed a soccer ball-sized chunk of material left in the Nodosaur’s stomach.

“The leaf fragments and other plant fossils were preserved down to the cells,” said David Greenwood, a biologist at Brandon University and co-author of the study.

The Nodosaur, or Borealopelta Markmitchelli, was an armoured giant. Despite its massive weight, which could be over a ton, the Nodosaur was a strict herbivore. And based on its stomach contents, its favourite vegetation was likely ferns.

A closer look at the nodosaur’s stomach contents.

After comparing its stomach contents with fossil leaves from the same time period and territory, researchers noted that the Nodosaur was a picky eater and preferred the soft leaves from certain types of ferns.

“The lack of horsetails and rarity of cycads and conifers is surprising, given that these are very common in the surrounding flora,” said Caleb Marshall Brown, curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. “Even within ferns, it looks like Borealopelta may have had a preference for certain types of ferns while ignoring others.”

In total, researchers found 48 microfossils of pollen and spores, moss and liverwort, 26 club mosses and ferns, two flowering plants, and 13 conifers.

The study also noted that were pieces of charcoal in the Nodosaur’s stomach. This turned out to be consistent with its time period, as forest fires were a common occurrence during the early Cretaceous period and ferns, which were low to the ground, could survive.

This nodosaur is among the best-preserved dinosaur specimens known to date.

Researchers estimated that a fire had indeed ravaged the grazing area of the Nodosaur about six months before it ate its last meal in the spring or summer.

“The discovery of charcoal together with a fern-filled stomach… suggested Borealopelta was likely a keystone herbivore that shaped the landscape by its grazing, and that it also grazed on the ferns growing in open areas created by wildfires,” Greenwood said. “That is so cool.”

The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in June 2020.

Island In The Clouds: Is Mount Roraima Really A ‘Lost World’ Where Dinosaurs May Still Exist?

Deep within the rainforests of Venezuela, a series of plateaus arise more than 9000 feet (2743 meters) off the ground. From above, they look like islands in the sky. These are the Tepuis (a Pemón Indian word for mountain), the most famous of which is called Mount Roraima. The Tepuis are so unique in their geography that thousands of plant species exist nowhere else on the planet except on these plateaus. The mystical mountains fascinated explorers and writers for centuries, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who described an ascent of Mount Roraima in his 1912 novel The Lost World. In Doyle’s novel, a group of explorers found that dinosaurs and other extinct creatures were still alive and well on the remote plateaus. Some people today still believe this to be a real possibility.

The Real Lost World

Once impenetrable to all but the Pemón indigenous people, Mount Roraima really was a lost world. The mountain plateaus were already established when South America was linked with Africa to form the supercontinent Gondwana, meaning they were first formed perhaps 400 to 250 million years ago. During this time, molten rock forced its way up through cracks in the sandstone landmass. At the same time, wind and water swept across Gondwana to erode the raised highlands into mountain ranges. The region would come to look much like it does now around 20 million years ago.

Because the Tepuis have been isolated for so long atop their high, lonely plateaus, the flora and fauna of the Tepuis provide an organic illustration of the processes of evolution. It is guessed that “at least half of the estimated 10,000 plant species here are unique to tepuis and surrounding lowlands. New species are still being discovered.” (George, 1989). Although all of the Tepuis have been climbed, only a few have been extensively explored. Could this mean that supposedly extinct species, even dinosaurs, may still exist atop these remote plateaus?

Could the Legends be Real?

The Roraima plateaus are so remote and so unique that it is not difficult to imagine Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creating a world alive with prehistoric plants and dinosaurs in his novel The Lost World. Doyle was fascinated with the accounts of British botanist Everard Im Thurn, who climbed to the top of Mount Roraima in December 1884.

Ascending Mount Roraima in 1989 for the National Geographic Society, German explorer Uwe George said, “None of us who followed Im Thurn to Roraima have found primordial creatures or their fossil remains there, but the terrain is so difficult that only a fraction of the Tepui’s 44 square miles has so far been explored” (George, 1989). Since his writing, more of Mount Roraima has been investigated and, unsurprisingly, no traces of dinosaurs have been found.

It is not hard to imagine dinosaurs walking atop these remote and ancient lands, but no evidence has been found to suggest this could be the case. (Drwallpaper)

Sacred Ground

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the natives of Venezuela viewed the tepuis as having special mythical significance. According to the Pemón Indians, Mount Roraima is “the stump of a mighty tree that once held all the fruits and tuberous vegetables in the world,” however it was “felled by one of their ancestors, the tree crashed to the ground, unleashing a terrible flood” (Naeem, 2011). They believed that if a person ascended to the top of the tepuis, he or she would not come back alive.

Mysterious Islands in the Sky Unlock Secrets of Our Past: Return to Tepuis | Short Film Showcase

A ‘Crystal Mountain Covered with Diamonds and Waterfalls’

Climbing the Tepuis is exceedingly difficult and is made all the more so by the frequent rains that makes the rocky footpaths slippery and muddy. The first European explorer to write about the Tepuis was Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595. He wrote of a crystal mountain covered with diamonds and waterfalls:

“There falleth ouer it a mightie riuer which toucheth no parte of the side of the mountaine but…falleth to the grounde with a terrible noyse and clamor, as if 1000 great belles were knockt one against another…but what it hath I knowe not, neyther durst he or any of his men ascende to the toppe of the saide mountaine, those people adioyning being his enemies (as they were) and the way to it so impassible.” (Raleigh quoted in George, 1989).

There is a good chance that Sir Raleigh was describing Angel Falls, so named for the mid-20th century American Jimmie Angel who was the first person to fly over the area. Angel Falls were recently featured in Disney’s Up, where the falls are referred to as Paradise Falls.

A scene from Disney movie ‘Up’ showing ‘Paradise Falls’, which were based on Angel Falls at Mount Roraima.

While today’s travellers may not stumble upon dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, they will be able to see black frogs and tarantulas that exist nowhere else on the planet. It is believed there are many other species unique to Roraima that are yet to be discovered.

Researchers used radiocarbon dating of eye proteins to determine the ages of 28 Greenland sharks, and estimated that one female was about 400 years old. The former vertebrate record-holder was a bowhead whale estimated to be 211 years old.

As lead author Julius Nielsen, a marine biologist from the University of Copenhagen, put it: “We had our expectations that we were dealing with an unusual animal, but I think everyone doing this research was very surprised to learn the sharks were as old as they were.”

Greenland sharks swim through the cold waters of the Arctic and the North Atlantic at such a sluggish pace that has earned them the nickname “sleeper sharks.” Image credit: Julius Nielsen

Greenland sharks are huge and can grow up to 5m in length. Yet, they grow at just 1cm a year. They can be found, swimming slowly, throughout the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.

The team believes the animals only reach sexual maturity when they are 4m-long. And with this new, very lengthy age-range, it suggests this does not occur until the animals are about 150 years old.

A newly tagged Greenland shark returns to the deep and cold waters of the Uummannaq Fjord in western Greenland. Image credit: Julius Nielsen

The research was made possible, in part, by the atmospheric thermonuclear weapons tests conducted during the 1960s, which released massive amounts of radiocarbon that were then absorbed by organisms in ocean ecosystems. Sharks that showed evidence of elevated radiocarbon in the nucleus of their eye tissue were therefore born after the so-called “bomb pulse,” and were younger than 50 years old, while sharks with lower radiocarbon levels were born prior to that, and were at least 50 years old or older, the study authors wrote.

The scientists then calculated an age range for the older sharks based on their size, and on prior data about Greenland sharks’ size at birth and growth rates in fish.

A Greenland shark near the ocean surface after its release from research vessel Sanna in northern Greenland. Image credit: Julius Nielsen

According to the results of the analysis – which has a probability rate of about 95% – the sharks were at least 272 years old, and could be as much as 512 years old (!) with 390 years as the most likely average life span, according to Nielsen.

Oldest Shark in the World – 512 Year Old Greenland Shark

But why do Greenland sharks live so long?

Their longevity is actually attributed to their very slow metabolism and the cold waters that they inhabit. They swim through the cold waters of the Arctic and the North Atlantic at such a sluggish pace that has earned them the nickname “sleeper sharks.” Seal parts have been found in their bellies, but the sharks move so slowly that experts have suggested that the seals must have been asleep or already dead when the sharks ate them.

The slower you go, the farther you will be.

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Viking Grave Found Under The Floorboards Of A Home In Norway

A Norwegian couple made an unusual historic discovery during renovations of their home. They found a number of Viking era artifacts, and now archaeologists believe that they have found a Viking grave, right there, under their floor. Experts are currently carrying out a survey of the site and the grave is being hailed as a very significant find.

The couple made the find while tearing up some floorboards in their family home in Seivåg near Bodø in Northern Norway. They were laying insulation when they came across some strangely shaped rocks.

Naturally, they were curious, and then they saw something round glinting in the light. They knew that it had to be old because the house had been built in 1914 and the floorboards had not been moved since. The house has been in the same family for over a century.

This Valuable Viking Grave is Missing Something Important

Viking Burial Under the Boards

Based on the shape of the object “they first believed it was the wheel of a toy car” according to The Local. The couple only later realized that what they had found could be something historic.

After some further digging, the couple found an iron axe head and some other metallic objects, that were all obviously old. ‘It wasn’t until later that we realized what it could be” Mariann Kristiansen, one of the owners of the house, told The Local.

Viking ax head, representation of the find at the Viking burial site in Norway. (British Museum / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The couple contacted the local authorities and experts from the local Nordland county government came to inspect the finds. Martinus Hauglid told the couple that they had most likely found a grave from the Iron Age in Norway. This was the era when the Vikings ruled in Scandinavia and terrified most of the known world.

The archaeologist told The Localthat the couple had found an “axe dated between 950 and 1050 AD.” The bead of glass, which was revealed to be blue dates from the same period.

A glass bead was among the first objects discovered in the Viking grave. (Nordland County)

Viking Cairn

It is believed that the stones found underneath the flooring came from a burial. The stones were likely part of a cairn. In this type of burial, a mound of stones and rocks are erected over the deceased which was a very common burial practice in the Iron Age.

A number of similar cairns were found in the Lendbreen Mountain Pass in Norway when a glacier melted. This was an important trade route in the Middle Ages.

Martinus congratulated the couple on their find and stated that they had done a good job, by reporting things so soon. The archaeologist said that it was the first instance of a Viking grave being found under a private dwelling in his 30 year career.

Archaeologists have begun an investigation of the grave. Forbes reports that under Norwegian Law any human artifacts or “activity before 1537 are automatically preserved.” The items found by the couple have been transported to a museum for conservation and safekeeping.

These stones formed the top of what archaeologists believe is a Viking burial ground. (Nordland County)

End of the Viking Age

Martinus is quoted by Forbes as stating that the finds under the floorboards date back to a time “when Norway transitioned to Christianity to become one kingdom.” This was the time when kings like Olaf Tryggvason, attempted to dominate the many chiefdoms and create a centralized state.

Some of these monarchs sought to impose Christianity on the pagan Norse as part of their efforts at state-building and this led to many civil wars. The grave could help researchers to better understand this crucial period in Norwegian history which saw the demise of the Viking Age.

It appears that the original builders of the house, over a century ago, were not aware that they were building a private residence on a grave. It is quite possible that they unearthed items and simply discarded them. This raises the possibility that some Viking-era grave goods were lost or destroyed during the construction of the family home.